Ethereum has shortcoming that the number of users are not that much great compared to the Bitcoins network. To come over from this issue and to increase in its number of users, it has introduced a solution called Plasma, which will solve the issues. The solution is given by the author of The Lightning Network, Joseph Poon, which can optimize the smart contracts and reduce the transaction fees for the users.

What is plasma?

Plasma is scaling solution that will help in scaling the Ethereum blockchain that will optimize the data which will be passed onto the root of the blockchain. By doing this, there can be a reduction in gas costs, transaction fees controlled by the smart contracts and decentralized applications, which will make the Ethereum ecosystem more adaptable for developers and users.

Plasma is very similar to the Bitcoin Core's scaling solution SegWit in the sense that it eliminates useless data in smart contracts and the public Ethereum Blockchain will only broadcast merkelized commitments to it.

1. By the declining amount of the information and the amount of transactions accepted in the root of the blockchain of Ethereum, Buterin and Poon have explained that the Ethereum Blockchain will be capable to process smart contracts and transactions with lower costs.

2. Coinbase founder Fred Ehrsam, has openly stated the importance of scaling of Ethereum, which is that Ethereum has to scaled in order to serve its milliions of users, which is served on a decentralized platform.

3.He also recommended both the off chain and on chain scaling problems.

4. He further said that "These are hard computer science and game theory problems out of which most of them have never been solved before. Calculating the completion can be difficult and can be far off. Large apps can’t run solely on-chain and likely never will.

They need off-chain scaling solutions. While it’s tricky to make accurate estimates when integrating all the scaling developments, it is achievable as we could see a 100 times improvement by the end of 2018, which would allow a 1 to 10m user app".

5. The limitations were once a possible issue discussed by researchers, which are now affecting the real users as well. The world's second largest blockchain platform has recently seen some capability issues, including rising smart contract fees that occasionally overload transaction times and suspend new ICO launches.

6. The criticism regarding the system are there. The technical idea behind these systems has been broadly discussed in blockchain communities, which has concerned both supporters and rivals. Each public blockchain protocol will sooner or later join against scaling limits.

7. Bitcoin, which is the most used blockchain today, was the first to give signs of scalability issues, with apparently nonstop arguements.

8. But, the critics disagree with the fact that ethereum's scalability problems are more obvious since it requires to stock up so much data.

9. Vlad Zamfir, ethereum's POS research lead, has given some critical comments already. He had tweeted yesterday that he's "honestly not excited" about the project,and that he had also abandoned a similar project in 2015.

10. Poon, does not seem much bothered by Zamfir’s doubts and Buterin either, stating that Plasma is compatible to Ethereum's current scaling work which is sharding, and which looks like it will boost its ability at the base layer of the protocol.

11. Poon though confessed that there is a long way to go. And that taking the idea to production will take a lot of testing.He compared Plasma and Lightning, which has covered a long distance, in the past couple years, but is still incomplete.

12. Ethereum has a very dynamic and co operative community for open source and one of the advantage of such community is the skill to develop solutions like Plasma that are needed to scale Ethereum and reduce the sizes of smart contracts and the transactions.

13. The Lightning Network was restricted to work strictly for payments only, Plasma extends the design to more intricate computations, like the ethereum smart contracts. Poon added that "Basically you want to do some mathematical operation; let's say it's really complicated and it takes a long time to do, and you ask someone else to do it for you" .

14. If the competitor gives a proof of the original solution is incorrect, others can figure it out and spot the error.

15. Also, the users have an option to start the calculation back to the main blockchain if they doubt any kind of fraud, settling the argument. According to Poon "Because all participants know they can be caught and penalized, they will be unlikely to try and defraud the system".

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